Samsung SSD Magician 4.0 Released With Major Upgrades

Samsung has released a major overhaul of their Magician SSD software, bringing the software to version 4.0. One of the biggest boons to owning a Samsung SSD is Samsung’s attention to detail, as evidenced by this extremely useful SSD optimization/tuning and management tool. The last version of the Magician software was 3.2 and supported up to Windows 7. When attempting to install the prior version of Magician software Windows 8 users were presented with a “This is a known incompatible program” message. Besides Windows 8 compatibility, other major changes include three pre-sets under OS Optimization, a Samsung Authentication screen, and a completely revised (and far more attractive) user interface.

This is the launch screen. The “eye candy” has been turned up and all critical information is in one spot.

This is the OS Optimization screen, and is one of the biggest changes besides the UI. There are now three pre-sets to choose from, eliminating the guess work of OS optimization for Samsung SSDs. If you don’t want to use a pre-set, there is the Advanced tab where you can tweak OS settings manually.

Another addition, although less helpful, is the SSD Authentication screen. This only works for the 840 Series SSDs, however.

The summary of changes in Samsung Magician ver 4.0 directly from Samsung’s website:

Note – SSD will not be recognized if it is part of a RAID array – Magician does not work with SSDs connected via the SCSI controller interface. – Only MBR and GPT partition types are supported. Magician may not work with other partition types. – Secure Erase is not supported for Windows 8 systems.

Note – SSD will not be recognized if it is part of a RAID array. I think its time for Samsung to open eyes,every fifth 840 pro is part of Raid field. We need that,if it can be done in OS environment,they should do it as a Linux-based bootable disk.

nick

My computer crashes every time I try to use one of the performance presets. I just ended up going by the tips from this sites’ optimization guide instead.

Donald Schultz

Did the crashing occur after a clean install and then using the Samsung Magician software, or had you already made tweaks to your OS prior to using the Magician software? What model Samsung SSD are you using and under what OS?

Thanks for the information. I will see this passed along via Les Tokar. All feedback is good feedback, as it helps improve products.

Donald Schultz

One more question…did Magician 3.2 display the same behavior or is this the first time using Magician? Both 3.2 and 4.0 are available on the website.

gat0gelat0

Version 4.0 may be well designed but seems to be applicable primarily to the 840 series. I have the 830. Three things that come up when I use version 4.0 are that: 1) It says that the device has not been booted in AHCI mode (I verified twice while rebooting, and it IS always in AHCI mode) and 2) it is unable to gather details about the SATA interface the 830 is connected to, and 3) When I set one of the three modes (I chose ‘maximum reliability’) and then rebooted the machine, and reopened the magician v4.0 sw, it tells me I am in maximum capacity mode (by default). Again, I tried this twice and was unsuccessful in making the ‘max reliability’ mode stick. I have unstalled v4.0 and put back v3.2. I don’t care about the fancy reworking of the magician sw. What I care about is that it works for my 830 series SSD and there are clearly some issues/bugs still to be sorted out.

Donald Schultz

Thank you for the feedback. I am speaking with Les Tokar about the best way to get this information back to Samsung. For the record I am also using a Samsung 830 Series SSD with Magician 4.0 and NOT having the same issues you are. I am also using Win 7 x64, and I use the Microsoft AHCI driver (personal preference over Intel’s AHCI driver) since I don’t make use of RAID or SSD cache capability via SRT.

Just for a point of comparison, and the fact I have not experienced the issues other folks are reporting, I am going to post my full system specs. For Magician 4.0, I did not use a pre-set and tuned using the Advanced tab. However, I did try the pre-sets and had no issue.

I had PM830 Samsung SSD 256 installed on my HP computer. Samsung Magican won’ recognize ssd as samsung product, because all other features except modeI brand, and firmware version, serial are greyed out and can’t read them. I want to use Samsung Magician utility and therefore I want to update my firmware to latest samsung firmware. My verson firmware is CXM05H1Q, and want to flash it with Firmware File (ver.CXM03B1Q) . Could that be possible?

Gabo

Samsung Magician instructions say that the problem with AMD chipsets can be resolved by installing the Microsoft driver – what driver are they referring to and where can it be found?